Graham Dixon, Oh Mother, What Did You Do?

Graham Dixon, Oh Mother, What Did You Do? (Pulchra Veritas)

A book that begins by identifying Ted Hughes as a Movement poet and proceeds to cite names such as Alan Ginsberg and Elliot makes one wary. Pulchra Veritas might well be Graham Dixon's own imprint and he doesn't appear to employ an editor. But he knew Thom Gunn and, as it turns out, the reader is rewarded with not only first-hand knowledge of the poet but some original and perceptive readings of the poems. That he turned himself into a psychotherapist after his literary studies is evidenced by his analysis of Gunn as a personality in parallel with the poetry. The subtitle Pose and Repose in the Life, Letters and Poetry of Thom Gunn is a summation of the main theme emerging, that of a search for respite from the traumas and discontent in Gunn's life. 

The poses adopted by characters in Gunn's poems, and by Gunn in real life, were always defence mechanisms to hold a threatening world at bay. The comparisons with Ted Hughes and the violence of nature were always dubious. Gunn is naturally a more withdrawn presence, adopting roles, attire and attitudes in order to get by.

Dixon's title comes from a diary entry by Gunn after his mother committed suicide when he was fifteen. As a psychoanalyst might, he makes much more of this devastating event, when Gunn and his brother found her, than purely literary commentaries do. It is not dissimilar to Sylvia Plath, gassing herself in desperation over her marriage.

It is that, several readings of early poems that find the coded homosexuality in them, Gunn's continued wearing of a Nazi leather belt and the late set of poems about the serial murderer, Jeffrey Dahmer, that make Dixon's account vividly one that shows Gunn exceeding perceived boundaries into amorality. While these elements of Gunn are not new discoveries, the prominence they are given puts emphasis on much more exotic material than the hippy, drug-taking bohemian scholar that had already marked him out as a maverick.

Dixon is insightful in his readings of such poems as Carnal Knowledge, Tamer and Hawk and Rastignac at 45 but also clear-sighted and confident enough to identify when the less successful parts of Gunn's uneven output fail. There are great poems in each of the books but some of the middle period, from Moly to Jack Straw's Castle, were experiments that didn't work. At times, in making the point, it might mean that Dixon has overlooked some fine poems that did but it's honest and time well spent to elucidate when even Gunn's talent was insufficient to carry his dark imaginings. If the LSD and prolific promiscuity went a long way in search of repose, it was a dangerous enterprise, didn't entirely work and the mantra from Gunn's early, if now dated, masterpiece, On The Move, that 'one is always closer by not keeping still' remained thematic for the rest of his life.

If the publication of Larkin's life and letters brought out unappealing detail that damaged his reputation, the same could have happened to Gunn but he didn't have quite such a reputation to damage beyond poetry readers of a certain age. In both cases one needs to be able to separate the work from the personality but friends and those who knew them for the most part liked both poets as people and if Larkin's later politics were unsavoury, Gunn is not overly concerned with politics. But one is never entirely sure what is hovering in the depths of his thinking even when he can write some of the most gorgeous poems of his or any other generation.

So, Graham Dixon's book is worth having as an honest and meaningful contribution to Gunn Studies. It is persuasive in making him more specifically a 'gay' poet, for better or worse than I, for one, had thought. It provides more about the vulnerability that the tough posturings of the Lines for a Book that he at least partially later disowned were written to overcome. One is the more aware of the contradictions and paradoxes of a life that he often successfully expressed but only sometimes successfully resloved. There was a time I thought that his apparent urbanity and intelligence put him in control of his poems and, by extension, of his life but it seems not. He was a sort of adventurer but it begins to look like those adventures were only ways of looking for escape.